Marco and I are fortunate in that we get to hear a lot of stories. Of course, as one of our mantras spells out, we are always on the lookout for stories that are better than others.

This story is that and a bit more. It is made of the stuff that nightmares are made off; to the point that Marco has been inspired to write a Cybersecurity Halloween Short Story after hearing this one. We shall see if that is actually going to happen.

in the meantime, it’s probably a good to take a deep breath before you listen (or watch a snippet of) our conversation with Ronan to the nightmare people may have gotten themselves into. Maybe it that new phone deal you got online wasn’t that good of a deal after all. Perchance it was just a nightmare. Perhaps it wasn’t.

What if you could have your cake and eat it too? No matter how many times you hear this, it still sounds good. Conversely, however, we can’t even remember how many conversations we’ve had over the years, about passwords and how inconvenient and old-fashioned they are—both for today’s businesses and for personal lives operating in the digital age.

Unfortunately not much has changed and, for a while, it looked like the best way to deal with adding extra security to a password was to verify it with yet another password. It felt like we were trying to maximize protection while minimizing disruptions; seemingly, this was (and still is?) as impossible as tasting that sweet cake and still having it. Drats!

Well, times are changing, and technology is finally coming to the rescue. Here is a story about it.

With over a decade in the cybersecurity industry, today’s guest — Yaron Kassner, Co-Founder of and CTO at Silverfort — tells a story of a career path that takes him through the data science and machine learning halls of Microsoft and Cisco before co-founding the Isreali-based firm, Silverfort, in 2015.

It's a good story. Have a listen. Just input your password when prompted.

During Black Hat, we had the chance to meet two of these individuals from Cequence Security: one is a security research veteran that has been with the company for a long time and the other a new-hire but with a long and solid history of looking after product marketing for another very well-known security brand.

During our chat, we get to talk about a lot of things, including the birth and evolution of a start-up; the potential liability a company may incur if they have a massive infrastructure built of IoT devices that get compromised, and; bots and other automated devices that can be turned into a cyber army with evil plans and unpleasant consequences for the Internet and its users.

It was a wild ride; a conversation that we truly enjoyed. We invite you to join us as Will and Matt take us up and down the rollercoaster of InfoSec.

With a background rooted in engineering, computer science, and middleware systems development, Mahesh Rachakonda, CISSP, VP Product & Solution Engineering at CipherCloud, has worked on several complex systems, including those found in hospitality, telecommunications, and even some military installments.

Taking the story beyond his role in the industry to that of CipherCloud’s story—which began back in 2010—Mahesh explains to us that the main company message and goal was all about enabling cloud adoption; something that initially took quite some effort to get organizations and people prepared and ready to trust this new operating environment.

As businesses adopted these cloud technologies, they also began to realize that there was a lot to understand concerning how and where security policies, controls, monitoring, and response were handled. This challenge is exacerbated given the sheer number of cloud environments running countless applications and services—which can vary dramatically depending on the industry and widespread use cases within each.

Listen to this story about Mahesh and CipherCloud. There is something interesting here for everyone — no doubt about it.

For today’s story, Sean and I connect with a former pharmaceutical IT professional and now-CEO of DataLocker, Jay Kim. While focused on IT problems, Jay found himself in the crosshairs of the Y2K phenomenon and got a real taste for what the “A” meant in the information security CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability). As a consequence of his choice to be in IT, Jay found himself on a business trip where he met an engineer with a novel idea about manufacturing secure external hard drives.

The idea turned into a patented, secure external hard drive device that was a platform-independent device with a built-in keypad used for authentication—meaning all the users had to do was plug it in and type in their passcode to access the data on the drive. With this, the company, DataLocker, was formed.

There’s a decent amount of story told by Jay covering the years following their FIPS-validated product in 2009, and I would encourage you to listen to hear how the business was, founded and funded, how the team grew, and how the product line and overall solution set was enhanced. Listen up. We think you will find some inspiring words here.

What's the connection between automating IT tasks and securing the world's identity directories? STEALTHbits CEO, Steve Cochran, describes the journey his company took to focus completely on information security.

How does a startup CEO with no cybersecurity experience end up a leader in runtime application security? Read about Prevoty co-founder and CEO Julien Bellanger’s journey in infosec in this exclusive ITSPmagazine interview.